Isaiah Berlin
Isaiah Berlin became one of our century's most important political theorists for liberty and liberalism in an age of totalitarianism. He was born in Riga, Latvia in 1909 into a well to do Jewish family. At the age of 12 he moved to Petrograd and experienced first hand the Bolshevik revolution, which would later influence his intellectual ideas about totalitarianism (Gray 3). In 1921 his family moved to London and sent Isaiah to school. His schooling lead him to Oxford where he took a position as philosophy professor in 1931. His English schooling led him to become a disciple of classical liberalism in the English tradition of Mill, Locke, and others (Berger). During World War II the British put him to work in their Foreign Service department where he became a favorite advisor of Churchill (Honderich 92). After the war his major political theory was developed as he moved into political philosophy and history as his areas of emphasis. His most famous and important works, a lecture, "Two Concepts on Liberty", and an essay, "The Hedgehog and the Fox" where produced in the 1950's. Knighted in 1957 and he became the first Jewish fellow at Oxford's All Souls College and chair of social and political theory at Oxford. Afte
Berlin might not have developed a specific political philosophy but regardless he had as much impact on the twentieth century as any other political philosopher. He made numerous contributions to the idea of liberalism in an era where totalitarianism rained. His notions of utopias where wiped away in the bloody snow of Petrograd of his youth. He didn't try and preach that one system was better than another instead he made comments on what he saw. Berlin was less concerned with his legacy and was hoping that liberalism and liberty would survive and age of horror and totalitarianism. The Constitution in its first ten amendments, the Bill of Rights, grants the citizens of the United States negative liberty. One has the freedom to speak, petition, practice religion, etc. with out restriction. This concept of absolute freedom is no doubt good but as Berlin and history would tell it has many drawbacks. One of the obvious ones is regarding slavery, which isn't restricted. This is an example of how too much negative liberty actually affects other individual's liberty. This is why positive liberty is good and not simply a form of tyranny. When the United States enacted the thirteenth amendment to the constitution it granted others a liberty at the cost of others, but in the case it was a fair and just trade off. The delicate part of positive liberty is making sure it's used in the right places to achieve a proper balance for society. Another example of how positive liberty was used properly in achieving balance in our country was the control of industry, especially the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1905, by the Progressives in the early part of our century. This moved the negative liberty held by corporations from freely doing whatever they wanted to a safer one for the consumer. American History is filled with many more examples like these some clearly for the better like those two and others that are debatable if they are too positive in liberty. All most all of the amendments dealing with Liberty starting with Reconstruction and beyond are positive in nature. Berlin would argue this is the US trying to achieve the proper balance in the two types of liberty. One of Berlins other important beliefs shown in the essay was the idea of value pluralism. He believed that with such a diversity of human beings are so different that there can be no one overall set of human values (Houston Chronicle News Service). Looking to the history of our country we can see the validity of positive and negative liberty. The history of the United States using Berlin's perspective can be divided into two time periods. The era in the United States before reconstruction can be seen as an era of negative liberty in the constitution and after that it became predominately positive in it's liberty to balance with the negative. This move towards positive liberty after reconstruction is what Berlin would consider the proper balance between the two types of liberty so that in a utilitarian sense the most people have the most liberty. Since Mill was a major influence for Berlin we can see this utilitarian view of liberty as logical. "The fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one big thing." Berlin asserted that Tolstoy needs only one principle to live life by such as the philosophy of Plato, Dante, Pascal, Nietzsche and Proust. "The Fox,
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2267
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)
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